


let me down slowly

by Verbyna



Series: fuck it, i love you [3]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Divorce, F/M, Marriage, Pregnancy, parenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-11-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:33:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21575314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/pseuds/Verbyna
Summary: A tear-out poster of Chloe in a bikini was tacked up in the break room for a whole day until Dan Espinoza tore it down.
Relationships: Chloe Decker/Dan Espinoza
Series: fuck it, i love you [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1504298
Comments: 22
Kudos: 219





	let me down slowly

**Author's Note:**

> gabby, forever and always, but particularly for beta-ing this and for those late nights spent plotting the series.
> 
> title from alec benjamin's song of the same name.

Chloe’s earliest memory is of her mother laughing. There were leaves above her head, maybe - a park or their backyard. Chloe must’ve been about two; her mom was beautiful and laughing, the full force of her smile beaming down on Chloe. She picked Chloe up and spun her around and around until the leaves blurred and the memory spun out into sound, a happiness big enough to fill the whole world.

“You were an angel,” Penelope always tells her. “I was so, so happy when you were small. You were perfect.”

Then came the other things, the not-so-perfect things: her dad’s funeral, Chloe on tear-out posters in teen magazines. Her mother’s quiet disappointment, her mother’s stiff face whenever someone mentioned how Chloe had followed in her footsteps. Chloe’s sadness, like a tremor that shook the ground under her feet; the tear-out poster of Chloe in a bikini that was tacked up in the break room for a whole day until Dan Espinoza tore it down.

Dan Espinoza, from then on. Dan’s hands and Dan’s casual defense of her, Dan’s LA body under her hands, between her legs when she rode him. The simple way they wanted each other, without discussing it, like they were always going to meet and she was always going to need her hard-won Hollywood confidence to ask him out.

When Dan asks Chloe if she wants kids, rubbing the back of his neck and looking somewhere over her shoulder, Chloe nods. She smiles her mother’s smile at him. Lets it fill his whole world.

“One. Gotta make it count,” she says, and Dan pulls her in for a kiss, and she lets him think whatever he wants.

*

They have a courthouse wedding to avoid papparazzi attention. Penelope gives Chloe away, relieved to see her marrying a cop instead of an actor.

Cops die, Chloe knows. Cops get shot at, cops get stabbed, cops shoot at people. Chloe will never forget the look on her father’s face when he came home after he shot a man dead for the first time. It bothers her, in a squirmy, under-the-skin way that she doesn’t want to name, that her mother is relieved at Chloe’s choice.

It makes it a little too obvious, her mother’s previous disappointment, if all this danger Chloe willingly walked into is the better option.

There’s not much of a party. Some colleagues from the station, their lieutenant, the three cousins that Dan’s still in touch with, her dad’s old partner, her mom’s former manager and his current wife.

Chloe doesn’t want cake smeared on her face. She tells Dan it’s because of the scene in the kitchen from the movie, but she just doesn’t want his hands on her in a way that makes her dirty.

She’s done feeling dirty. She won every bit of dignity she has, and it’s not worth losing any of it over a stupid tradition. Sugar on her skin makes her break out, anyway.

Dan shrugs. “Guess we’ll just eat the cake, then.”

Chloe’s glad he never insists on stupid things.

*

She keeps her name and ditches the birth control. The plan is to give it a year, eighteen months, before she starts any medical investigations. It took Penelope seven long years to have Chloe, but Chloe is not her mother. There’s no reason to assume the worst before she even tries.

Three months later, she’s pregnant. 

“Oh my God,” Dan whispers when she tells him. “Oh my _God.”_

She tries not to hold it against him when he goes to buy another carton of milk and comes back after two hours. It was a shock to her, too. Maybe not as much of a shock, but she can’t exactly take a break from her own body to deal with it.

He comes back smelling like beer and she fucks him on the sofa, pins him against the backrest and curls over him to bite at his neck.

They’re really, really good at this.

Dan spreads his fingers on her lower back, urges Chloe to move faster, and she clenches on the way up like she can pull his hips to follow hers. He hides his face against her chest - she fists her hands in his hair, holds him in place, doesn’t let herself make too much of it.

They both come twice by morning.

They agree not to tell anyone until she’s three months along, just in case.

*

Chloe’s six months along and Dan’s going to get a promotion.

It’s fair, Chloe says, because he’s been with the precinct longer.

It’s unfair because he wasn’t there much longer than Chloe, and she’s better. She’d never say it, and she hates that she even thinks it, but she knows it’s true. He’s married, with a kid on the way; he’s getting promoted so he can provide while she’s being put out to pasture. 

She leaves the second her shift ends. Desk duty was never her forte. Dan stays late, sits on the chair closest to their front door when he’s on duty, gets three collars in two weeks because he won’t stop working. 

*

Chloe bought the house before they got married. Her embarrassing movie paid well, in the end, enough for a house and a car and a little nest egg for the baby. One night, she sees Dan sitting in his car in the driveway, looking at the house like he’s on a stakeout.

She pretends she never saw him when he comes in. Despite what her IMDb page might suggest, she can act normal. No one ever rated her carpet performance at the Razzies, but if they had, they might’ve offered her more parts.

She’s glad they didn’t. She might’ve accepted them.

*

They fuck every day, and neither of them is faking it.

They might be tired all the time, they might fall asleep right after, but the sex is amazing.

*

Penelope is on a cruise on the Fourth of July, so Dan’s family invites them to spend the day. Dan tries to get a shift, tries to say no to his mother, but Chloe’s eight months pregnant and her patience is pretty thin. “We’re not spending the Fourth by ourselves,” she says, because they don’t have friends and she’d rather eat her favorite boots than show up at the lieutenant’s barbeque.

“Fine,” Dan says, “but me and my cousins drink.”

She doesn’t know what he means - he’s always just had beer, she’s only seen him drunk on one date and that was because he was trying to keep up with her - until she’s in her mother-in-law’s tiny backyard.

He still drinks beer, but he doesn’t stop. His cousins keep lugging an entire cooler around, from the grill to the backdoor when they sit down, and they just. They drink, until they’re well and drunk, and then they switch to Spanish, and Chloe’s mother-in-law clucks her tongue at them but doesn’t say anything.

Dan’s a grown-ass man, but Chloe still wants to put him to bed. Tuck him in, tell him he doesn’t have to try so hard.

And everyone’s speaking Spanish now, like the guys switching was a cue. They address her in Spanish and shake their heads when she blinks, and it occurs to her for the first time that she may be almost embarrassingly white (Dutch and English, per her IMDb profile) but her daughter will fit in here.

Her daughter will go places Chloe can’t follow, but Chloe still has to know them, even if it’s from the outside. 

So she hauls herself to her feet and goes to find her mother-in-law in the living room. The heat is slightly more bearable inside, and Valeria doesn’t take much convincing to show Chloe pictures of baby Dan, twelve-year-old Dan, high school graduate Dan.

There’s a Madonna statue next to the TV in front of them. Chloe wonders if Dan believes in God, the way Valeria and Penelope do. She thinks she should know that by now.

Dan comes to get her when the food’s ready, but he lingers by the album before he shuts it, slides it carefully back on its shelf. Valeria goes to the kitchen and Chloe doesn’t know what to do except beam at him, like someone’s taking pictures. The baby’s kicking her kidneys.

“I hope she looks like you, Chlo,” Dan says, swaying a little.

She wants to ask him what he means. She doesn’t know how.

The food is amazing.

*

Her daughter’s born in August, in the middle of the night. She comes a little early and Dan’s on call, and just as Chloe’s about to go into the delivery room, his phone goes off.

She tells him to go, vaguely relieved that he won’t witness what’s about to happen. Penelope is there, crushing Chloe’s hand, and Chloe doesn’t have the energy to quantify the look on her mother’s face when Dan goes.

It takes four hours, which Chloe hopes she won’t remember accurately.

They picked Patricia because it came up in both their family trees, but when Chloe holds her daughter for the first time, she says, “Hi, Trixie.”

*

Trixie is a beautiful baby, but very, very loud. Penelope rolls her eyes and says, “She’s a Leo,” but she’s only around during the day, when Trixie’s well-rested and recently fed.

At night, Chloe wonders if she’s being punished. Maybe it was too easy to get pregnant, compared to what her mother went through to have her. Maybe she has to make up for it.

She catches herself opening the door for a delivery with a breast pump still attached, falling asleep on the carpet next to Trixie’s crib, shoving meatballs into her mouth with one hand while rolling spaghetti on the fork with her other hand because Trixie’s already wailing again.

Dan sits in the car sometimes, when the noise is too much. Just in the driveway or parked down the street. Chloe doesn’t want to blame him, but she does.

Sometimes she thinks she hates him, for having work and surfing and the car outside.

She doesn’t tell him when the doctor gives her the all-clear for sex. If she has to suffer - well, she’s fine with her hand, and he should suffer too.

*

She’s a Hollywood kid, but she’s also a policeman’s daughter. She meant her vows when she said them, even if they weren’t in church; she said yes because she wanted a person forever, a family of her own, a home to make safe and be safe in for the rest of both their lives.

Chloe doesn’t think the word _divorce_ a lot.

She doesn’t think it at two in the morning, wincing because she’s out of nipple guards and Trixie’s teething. She doesn’t think it at her mother’s house while Dan’s on a case and there’s all this silence around the table, the aftermath of that same vow ending after it was kept. She doesn’t think it at the supermarket when they got bored and put a bad pap photo of her at the bottom of a tabloid front page, or when the cashier tries to bond about being single mothers.

It takes so much effort not to think the word that she’s got three divorce lawyers’ numbers saved on her phone.

She thought of it as taking practical steps to keep her life running smoothly, as it has been. Protecting her assets, because there was no prenup and she still has some money - her trust fund, which was supposed to get her through a more expensive university than the one she attended on a merit scholarship, and commercials money from her teens, and she’s holding it in trust for Trixie now.

She thought of it as a transaction, and hiring a professional to mediate.

They separate their assets and Dan moves out. The lawyers never get a call, but Penelope and Valeria talk a lot, and maybe that’s what they needed - adults who’ve been through this, because it’s pretty obvious they had no idea how to do it in the first place.

They meant so well.

*

Nothing changes except for Dan’s address.

Trixie doesn’t clue in to what they’re doing, because Dan’s there at six in the morning with breakfast or picking her up for school later. This isn’t fair, it feels like lying to her, but it also feels kind. What if they can make it work next month, or next year?

Chloe was the exception. All her friends came from broken homes. And Dan didn’t have a single divorce on his street growing up, which is the same problem from the other end.

They just don’t feel _over,_ though. They genuinely like each other.

(That doesn’t mean anything.)

*

Dan messes up.

It’s not a misdemeanor or something that falls within Chloe’s purview to forgive, but something really bad, something that’ll follow both Chloe and Trixie.

He signs the papers Chloe served him months ago, even if the papers were routine. They spent so long giving each other outs, different addresses and their lawyers and buying each other coffee, that Chloe forgot the power those papers had.

The funny thing is that it probably hit them at the same time, even if she’s the one who filed for divorce. Not funny like laugh-out-loud, funny like strange. She doesn’t have any friends to talk to about it, but she’s pretty sure they’d try to tell her that Dan deserves to get dumped and he knew it was coming.

That wouldn’t be true.

Dan is still the boy Chloe loves, and he deserves it. He’s just not good at being Trixie’s parent, no good at co-owning assets with. He deserves to be loved, but he doesn’t fit here.

He did, though. Once. Chloe will never cheapen it.

*

The divorce is finalized and neither of them brings up the possibility of Chloe moving to a different post, because they have to talk so often that it’s worth the discomfort of seeing each other all the time. They don’t work constant hours; they need to coordinate to make sure Trixie’s always got one of them on call, so it never comes up.

Another thing that never came up - and Dan seems pretty disturbed by it - is Chloe’s ambition. What did he expect? 

It’s not like Chloe didn’t realize what she was signing, when she agreed to do that movie. It’s not like she didn’t have entertainment contract lawyers look it over. Even at eighteen, she knew she’d need the money someday; her dignity wasn’t bought cheap.

She just never had a reason to work this hard before Trixie.

Dan will love her for the rest of his life, and Chloe will love him back. The story’s not just about them anymore.

She’s got Trixie to think of - her school and her toys, her development, the house they live in. The extra lessons and the social media accounts that Chloe supervises, where there should be something better about Chloe than her with her tits out the summer before college. There’s a better story for Trixie to see than her mother peaking at eighteen and having an undistinguished career as a public servant.

Chloe will make her reputation as soon as she can, before Dan’s is ruined, in time for Trixie to remember it without the sacrifices. Fuck Dan’s wounded pride.

He’s a big boy. He can tuck himself in.

**Author's Note:**

> soundslikepenance on tumblr


End file.
